A Winters Express op-ed column By Charley Wallace
Maybe it is just me, but I still believe Joe Montana is the greatest quarterback of all time. He never lost a Super Bowl and he didn’t need to deflate his footballs like Tom Brady. Brady gets credit for winning seven Super Bowls, but he lost three times. Montana never lost a Super Bowl and never threw an interception in his four Super Bowl wins. Amazing.
Brady also has longevity on his side, while Montana took some big hits that shortened his career, Brady has been a stud and doesn’t miss many games, if any. Brady, at 43, looks better than ever, and if he wins one more big game, I may have to call it a tie. If you root for teams that Brady played on, fine with me, you can jump on his bandwagon, just don’t fall off when someone better comes along.
I’m a week behind writing about the wind and power outages, but I have been looking at generators and battery backups. My Toyota Tacoma has a 110 volt plug in the bed that I have never used. Usually if we wake up to no power, I just get out my camping stove and make some coffee. This time I decided to plug in the pickup and run an extension cord in to the kitchen. 400w may sound like a lot, but not when you are plugging in a coffee pot and a shop light. The 500w shop light blew the circuit breaker on the pickup, but thank God it wasn’t a fuse.
It took awhile but we had coffee and a few LED lights to brighten up the kitchen. Our power came back on later that day while others weren’t so lucky, especially the north side of Main Street, down Railroad all the way to Grant Avenue. It shouldn’t take days to get power restored, but then again, all of Northern California had problems. I’ll give PG&E a break, but they did help with generator and battery sales.
When I ventured out to the golf course, I was shocked at the damage. Winters didn’t look that bad, but there were pine branches and debris blown 75 yards across the fairways. A couple large trees were down and lots of big limbs were snapped like twigs. The sound of chain saws filled the air and the ground crew kept busy with their 4-wheelers and trailers hauling the brush away.
There was still power at the course and the cleanup only took a few days, so not too bad. I did notice that the trees that I always find myself behind were still standing.
Downtown Winters wasn’t so lucky with one side of the street closed and the other looking for customers. If you can, support your local merchants with take out orders or eating outside. Remember that pitchers and catchers report next week, so life is trying to get back to normal.
